Yesterday Google launched its online health service, Google Health. But seeing as Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, do you really want to give them all your personal medical records?

We know that Google Mail scans your emails in order to give advertisers better targeting - Google is open about this and makes no apologies for it. Afterall,

“Google is a business. The revenue the company generates is derived from offering its search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on Google and on other sites across the web.”

So should we really be offering up our medical details to Google? Is it helpful to have an agglomerated list of medical records? Will Google use the information solely to sell advertising? Afterall, we know that medication has fairly inelastic pricing and big pharma is big money so this seems like a sensible market for Google to enter. It certainly causes alarm for other online medical services who provide the same service such as WebMD & healthe. But healthe won’t pass your information onto 3rd parties except in emergenices or when legally required - WebMD kind of does.

Google is very open about its methods and aims. But I am pretty sure that there are plenty of people out there that use Gmail without realising their messages are scanned and likewise will use Google Health without knowing their data will not be stored in privacy. Should these people be made aware? What more can Google do? Afterall they already state their case clearly and any 3rd party intervention from the state pushes our government further down the road of the nanny state. Personally, I won’t give them my details but I’m not quite sure why. I just don’t feel comfortable with it, but I am not sure that it is necessarily wrong to share my medical records. I’m happy to be an organ donor - what’s the difference?

All we do know is that this is another nugget gold mine of information that Google will own. Alongside your emails and financial information, are we getting to a Rollerball-esque vision of the future whereby corporations know more than the state? I’ll be supporting Houston.

Tags: google, google health, health, healthe, privacy, rollerball